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George Church (Photo credit: jurvetson)

Sure, a lie can travel halfway around the world as the truth ties its shoes, but nonsense about cloning a Neanderthal baby can go even faster.

Last week, Der Spiegel, the German newspaper, ran a story on Harvard geneticist George Church and his wonderful book, Regenesis, in which he discussed whether it would be possible to create a clone of a Neanderthal. The hardest part, Church has said repeatedly, would be finding a modern woman willing to act as a surrogate – although then he proceeds to rattle off a list of necessary biotechnological innovations that would stagger a normal scientist but don't scare him, because, of course, he's George Church, and he's been inventing breakthrough DNA sequencing technologies since you were in diapers.

Of course, complexity doesn't always translate well. When the interview was initially posted in German, a slew of blog posts took Church's comments to mean that he was ready to create a Neanderthal now, if only he can find a willing volunteer. Or, as the Daily Mail put it:

This morning, The Boston Herald got in touch with Church about the Neanderthal story. “The real story here is how these stories have percolated and changed in different ways,” Church told his local tabloid. “I’m sure we’ll get it sorted out eventually.” As for Neanderthal creation, he said: “I’m certainly not advocating it. I’m saying, if it is technically possible someday, we need to start talking about it today.” I contacted Church about the stories, asking if the Herald's report was accurate. He wrote: “Yes the Boston Herald did a good job of cutting through many layers of viral web third-hand news.”

I'm surprised that normally sedate people ran with this "news." The shame, to me, is that this kind of hyperventilating distracts from a lot of the really fascinating work that Church is doing. I'm in fact working on a story now (expect it soon) about genome-editing technology coming from his lab and elsewhere that could make it far easier to edit the genomes of human cells, and could, I think, revolutionize biotechnology. But talk of using these kinds of tools to make Neanderthals, or even mammoths, which present fewer ethical issues, is very, very far off. The Island of Dr. Moreau stuff really isn't helping anybody.

Journalists and bloggers bear a lot of the blame here for being willing to publish third-hand-riffing on a translated quote that does not bear much resemblance to reality. But part of the blame should go to technology, too. All of us know that a big part of getting our stories read is getting picked up by Google News. And one thing that seems to work well is writing very fast, often assembling stories from quotes found elsewhere.

Google might actually have the ability to help slow the speed of future nonexistent Neanderthal babies. One positive step, which Google already takes, is to take the author of an article into account. Another step I'd recommend: make stories less likely to appear in search if they contain a quote that has already appeared somewhere else. There have got to be ways to use artificial intelligence to determine the difference between re-written news with minimal reporting, like this post, and original reporting. I'd personally be happy to make that trade.

Culturally, we would all do better to seek out primary sources more often. Instead of sharing the first link you read, comb back to find the original work. Sadly, that sounds a lot less likely to happen than a technical fix in Google's algorithms.

Below are some real videos of George Church at Forbes' recent Health Care Summit.